My family bought me a Cuisinart SS-15 coffee maker, a device that has both a carafe (a pot) and a Keurig-compatible single-serve coffee maker.
However, the single-serve side struggled to work; it worked once and then stopped.
The problem seems to be, of all things, the water filter.
I gently used a toothpick to clean out the single-serve needle – which is, BTW, a needle, so it’s rather sharp – and that cleared out some stuff that looked like it came from the water filter packet.
Now it seems like it works properly.
we have the same model. the single serve will work with the keurig holder but will not work with the homebarista reusable filter cup. Can not figure out why other than the keurig holder fits into s notch the homebarista does not.
My side with the cup leaks why
Our single serve side has stopped working. It makes a noise like it is getting ready to brew and then stops. When it does that all three size indicator light start flashing and will not brew.
Hrm. Mine was acting funny too – it was some material that got caught in the injector. I took a toothpick and cleaned it out (just gently put it in and scraped the sides) and some of the filter matter came out – and it’s worked perfectly ever since.
This just happened to mine I bought after Thanksgiving 2020. Did you find out why? Mine also let out a bunch of Steam.
The same thing happened to me. My unit is less than a year old. Does anyone know if there is a fix for this?
This happened to me the other day as well, I’m not sure what happened but I cleaned the nozzle and after about 10min of the unit being off it started working again
Mine is only brewing cold brown water at this point? It is less than a month old. Any ideas why it is not heating the water?
No, and I’m sorry to hear that! You should probably contact either Cuisinart or the company you bought it from for customer support. Surely it’d be under warranty at this point.
It also happened to ours. I used a toothpick and poked inside the needle that punctures the cup. It was jammed with coffee or something. It worked after that and the three lights stopped blinking
Thank you, that was the problem I had and your solution became my solution as well. Thank you for posting
I have the same problem. Did you get help with that issue
The lights won’t come on and neither side functions. However the clock is working fine. The rest of the coffee maker is just dead!
I am having the same exact problem. Have you resolved the issue?
i had a plugged ss15 delivery nozzle that i freed up with a toothpick. very easy! then several rinses with vinegar and it works. saved 200 bux. cuisinart is helpful. nobody fixes coffeemakers apparently.
when you lift the cup holder after a failed rinse and blinking lights etc , you see the cup perforator and right behind it, in loine, is a nozzle. theres the toothpick entry. somewhat behind that contraption is a valve head, a little push button that prevents steam from bypassing the kerig cup. use a spoon and push it in after a failed rinse: careful, hot steam fizzes out. that tells you the cup nozzle is plugged but the coffeemaker works. do that a few times to bring steaming rinse fluid into the nozzle. the nozzle plugs up because the ground kerig coffee is too finely ground. so the toothpick trick should be repeated often! cant hurt.
looks like a switch is kaputt. sure your settings on the left are ok? if the clock is on, it might run on an internal battery? try cuisinart help line. they have a collection of glitches . make sure you knowv your model, its under the bottom plastic, hard to read. try the toothpick rinse on the right side, its too simple! you never know.
Seems like quite a few of us have been having this same issue with the SS-15 single serve side. When we first bought ours we rarely used the single serve side. Now we use the single serve side more than the carafe side and it has been having this issue, off and on for the past few months. I have cleaned the nozzle out and it does start to work again. My personal feeling is there is a design flaw that should be looked at by Cuisinart. I do plane to contact them about this issue.
Our single use side “blows up” the coffee pods. I’ve done all the requisite cleaning of the needles and descaling. Any recommendations for what else can I do? This machine is barely a year old.
I have had mine for a while & the single serve works – I had never tried using the carafe side before. Nada. I even got out the instruction book to make sure I was doing it right. Nothing brews but the beeps that are supposed to happen at the end of the brew cycle happen quickly.
Hrm. I had a problem with the carafe side but it was because the idiot using the carafe (me) didn’t put the top of the carafe in place; the release relies on vertical pressure so if the carafe lid isn’t in place properly, the carafe side won’t drain correctly. Drove me CRAZY until I figured it out, even though it should have been pretty obvious.
Sorry to hear yours is having problems!
take a toothpick and gently insert it deep into the keurig nozzle reflush restart voila
plugged keurig nozzle, steam pops off the do-hoiickey switch that opens steam into the keurig tip! if the keurig ios plugged the steam pops off…not gud
foul heating element. cuisinart has a 3 year warranty starting at the purchase date! call them and have your purchaser slip ready.
either that or you have exceptionally hard water. hard to believe. a kink in the steam tubing maybe. anyways if repeated acid rinses dont clear it return to cuisinart: 3 year very generous warranty, sales slip required
this seems to be 99% of the glitches of the keurig side. very easy fix. do it monthly. i guess not all keurig coffees are well groundc and some very volatile peaces escape into the nozzle and swell there and plug you up, regardless of calcium in the water. so toothpick and vinegar and you have a happy machine.
My personal opinion is that there is a design flaw. I understand they have a generous 3 year replacement warranty. That is great. We paid top dollar for this machine and I expect it to work flawlessly during it’s warranty period, without having to use toothpicks etc to clean it out every couple of weeks! I will be contacting them for a replacement. Hopefully the replacement has been a design modification.
i hope you are more forgiving when your wife fixes your sandwich! you sound terribly selfimportant and unpleasant or demanding. no you cant grind coffee to uniform bits that will not volatilize.try the nestle cups? has nothing to do with cuisinart methinks. if cuisinart sells this machine by the million, customers like you must be rather rare. if i was you i’d try an italian or the original nestle machine. the more you pay the less you complain. its like with food: the more you complain about the quality in the store, the less you eat well at home.
Why is it that there is always some self-righteous moron that feels they have to made snide remarks about someone who they know nothing about. Not to mention has no idea what the real issue is. The issue with these coffee makers has nothing to do with the uniform grinds of coffee. It is an issue with the heated water and scale that forms and clogs the output of the Keurig side of the machine. Freddy!
I agree with you about the design flaw. I’ve tried everything they recommend and it still backs up, and hot water comes out everywhere. They told me it was “most certainly” caused by not pressing the cup in place. Wrong. Anyone who is still in the return window should return it to the retailer and buy something else. Cuisinart has no intention of making it right.
my single serve cuissinart leave grounds in my cup, why is this happening?
It’s not something that can actually be avoided – the Keurig single-serve mechanism doesn’t have a filter to prevent this 100%.
i’d agree with jottinge….why dont ytou try a different keurig cup, nescafe original, just differently milled? might help….and frequently toothpick the nozzle?
I have tried everything y’all have suggested and no luck for the single serve. I have 3 blinking lights, the brew light is on and the clock works. One out of 10 times I get a motor type sound but no water. I am desperete.
I’m sorry to hear that! And I totally understand. What I would do, though, is call Cuisinart. In the US, this is what their site says about support:
It sounds like this is something they should address, and it’s beyond anything you should have to deal with.
hmpf. can you thread a 16 gauge electric wire through the nozzle until it comes out at the water through on the other end? if its not in the nozzle itself , then you have a plug further down the plastic pipe. highly unusual. a kink??? if your device is <3years old cuisinart will replace it!
Here is the the deal with Cuisinart’s 3 year warranty. If you feel there is a problem with your SS-15 then you have to contact them (wait on hold for a while) they will tell you that you have to ship the unit back to them so they can “verify” if something is wrong with the unit. They warn you that this will take at least three weeks for them to receive the unit, evaluate if anything is wrong, then either send you a new one if there is something wrong, or send the unit back to you if they determine it is a “operator error”. In my opinion this is pure BS. If you are having problems with a product that costs $200 and it worked fine for months and then all of a sudden it is no longer working properly, they need to send you a replacement unit, and then you send them the defective unit back (at their expense) Believe me, I have been thought this with them, It is ludicrous! Oh, they did say they would pay for the shipping for you to send it back to them for eval while you are without a coffee maker for three weeks. But you have to find a box to package it in if you do not still have the original box. Again, pure BS with their supposed three year warranty. Buyer Beware, Cuisinart is not a company that stands behind their products or warranties.
i can agree with you.
ever since i cleaned the nozzle, i get a steam leak and loose steam when making coffee with the ss15 model. so i have to set the cup size as full and get half a cup….bummer but viable.
is that why the ss15 model is discontinued?
I called cuisinart customer service last week and told them that my coffee maker Keurig side was having a problem with leaking and spilling water and after about one minute of describing the issue with the leaking and spilling the representative told me they would send a new unit to me.. within 1 week the new unit arrived. She told me I need cut the plug off my old unit and email the pic to the company. super easy and cuisinart has great customer service.
This was posted January 25th 2022, the new coffee maker arrived today and I made the phone call about a week and a 1/2 ago. It was pain free and I’m confused why so many people are having issues with the warranty process…it’s very easy the customer sales representative was super nice and and the phone call took about 10 minutes.
Well, I would only assume they have had so much negative complaints that they have changed the errors in their ways. It certainly was not the situation nor the experience I encountered. It is either that that or you lucked out and had someone “reasonable” to deal with. Or perhaps you were born with the ‘Midas’ touch. regardless, good luck with the new replacement unit. it will fail again (the K cup side that is) all of them eventually do that have any kind of daily use.I bought a new machine but not from Cuisinart.
Freddy, get real, its a piece of junk and Cuisinart will not stand behind their product, and makes life difficult if you want then to warrant their product. Phiff!!!
i think threading a wire through a nozzle is not too much tinkering, and cuisinart is very supportive but only for real manufacturing problems. i think the keurig capsules have a problem with milling. some are too dry, some too powdrey, some not ripe etc. if you can, try to store the capsules in the fridge once you unplugged your ss15. its a good piece of equipment, just sensitive to deviations from the norm.
oooooh i am called freddy…..like in my fair lady? go and marry freddy….or did you mean fredo?
another trick to fix the ss15 is to replace the black cup holder from cuisinart. there is a do-hickey in the bottom of the cup that might be a cause for the steam leak. just as an idea, to get around replacing it altogether? just so…..
Mine is only 2 months old. It worked this morning once and then I went to make a second cup. The pod light will turn on when the unit is open but after I put a pod and water in and close the unit the light won’t come on nor will it brew.
Freddy , does your wife make you soup sandwiches?
Having tried all other remedies, having my return period expired, and not being willing to wait for a warranty exchange, I disassembled the head on mine. I found the puncture nozzle to be partially blocked by molding plastic, probably from the point of assembly. I used a #38 drill bit to clear the nozzle, reassembled and it works perfectly now.
You mileage may vary. I have no idea if your unit has this defect. If you attempt this repair and you screw it up, don’t contact me and don’t blame me. My scientific evaluation of this defect has a sample size of one.
Yeah, that’s not too far off from what happened to mine, I think, although I managed to clear mine early on. Thank you!
Great investigative work and fix. Thumbs up!
agree, lmd….more details on what exactly was fixed and how, please!
For those having trouble with pod exploding, I just called customer service about it. The lady told me to push the pod down to puncture the bottom of the pod, then close the lid. When you do this, the pod slides down flush in the pod. If you don’t get the bottom punctured, the pressure will explode the top of the pod. This is NOT in the instruction manual – but it works and makes sense.
ok that.
i have a problem with the cup measurements: no matter what i punch in, small med or large, i get 30% less coffee and steam gets off …..too much….any tricks to fix that?
nuisance but….. i use large all the time and get small to med cup………workaround.
Randy, I tried that and it still exploded. Then Cuisinart sent me a new insert which has a new needle in the bottom to puncture the pods. This still did not help and had it exploded almost every 3rd or 4th time we used it. I finally had mine replaced with a new unit which now has been working fine for at least two months now. Keeping fingers crossed.
I have the sane problem. It seems like it tears a hole in the pod that is too large. Coffee grounds go everywhere. I had a Keurig for 7 years and no issue with this ever! Mine is from 12/2020.
I bought my elderly patents the Cuisinart Coffee Center. They’ve used it fine for 2 years, and now the top cover, you push down to brew the single pod coffee broke, the plastic hinge broke. Has anyone else had this issue and found a remedy for it. A $200.00 coffee maker should last longer than 2 years. Thanks